Author, essayist, journalist, poet

Journal

Last week I talked with Vincent D’Ononfrio about his film Don’t Go In the Woods, to be featured at the Woodstock Film Festival this year. Familiar with his quirky reputation as an actor’s actor who none-the-less gets under the skin of female Law & Order: Criminal Intent viewers, I want to shout to all women, […]

Two poets hover over lunch at the Hurley Mountain Inn: one is droll, a suave curmudgeon; one has the affable demeanor of a William H. Macy character. One drives a hybrid; one hates cars altogether. One got lost on a mountain because he didn’t believe his compass; one slipped on leaf-covered ice because he’d put […]

I walk up South Manor with Jonah in my arms, intending to distract him from his realization that Mommy is not around, hoping to assuage his minor upset, his tiredness, his overriding desire to bury his face into the pillow of her breast and be drunk with the milk of all that it means.

I told my children, “You picked me.” I introduced this concept when they were each young, when their malleable, trusting curiosities could still be bent to accept such a notion matter-of-factly. Certainly, I had not ever consciously chosen to become pregnant—although I did choose to stay pregnant after much soul-searching now and then.

There were boys in the neighborhood that would occasionally come around to play with a girl. They wore tee shirts with horizontal stripes and scruffy leather shoes and sometimes sneakers, which were just coming into the fashion scene—not as fashion, rather as practical footwear for kids. I wasn’t enthralled with these boys, not like I was with a dark-haired, dreamy-eyed Italian kid named Mike who lived on a corner around the block.